way to argue with that.
The drivers headed for the closest dump to load up with whatever the troops might need today (or whatever the quartermaster had, which wasn't always the same thing). Before they got there, a bird colonel in a command car waved them down. 'You men have empty trucks, right?'
'Yeah? So?' the lead driver asked. Being technically a civilian, he could get away with things that would have put a soldier in the stockade. Cincinnatus was only two trucks behind, and could hear everything that went on between the driver and the officer.
That worthy didn't even blink at the near-insubordination. 'So you're going to come with me instead of going wherever the hell you were going.'
'We can't do that!' the lead driver exclaimed. 'They'll have our heads.'
'No, they won't,' the colonel said. 'Whatever you were doing, what I've got for you is more important. Unless you're on your way to pick up a bunch of those kraut superbombs, this trumps everything. And I will have your guts for garters if you fuck with me, buddy-I promise you that.'
The lead driver considered, but not for long. 'Colonel, you talked me into it,' he said. Cincinnatus would have said the same thing; he didn't think the colonel was bluffing.
All the man said after that was, 'Follow me.' He got into the command car, nudged the driver, and took off. The truck convoy rumbled after him.
They headed straight for Huntsville-straight for the front, in other words. Cincinnatus began to wonder if the colonel wasn't one of those Confederate impostors who showed up every now and then. Even more than raiders, they caused trouble all out of proportion to their numbers. If this son of a bitch was leading a whole column of trucks into an ambush…
Cincinnatus glanced over to the submachine gun beside him. He had as many bullets as he could for the Confederates, and one more for himself afterwards. They wouldn't take him alive no matter what.
The command car pulled up in front of a nondescript factory building-or it would have been, except for the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding it. Soldiers stood at the doorway, soldiers in green-gray uniforms. Cincinnatus breathed a sigh of relief.
'Let them come out!' the colonel shouted. The soldiers waved and nodded. They threw the doors wide.
'Do Jesus!' Cincinnatus gasped. His next thought after an ambush had been that the USA might have overrun another camp where the Confederates got rid of their Negroes. He turned out to be wrong, but what he saw was just about as bad. He hadn't imagined anything could be.
The men who came shambling out were white. They wore striped uniforms, the way convicts had back when Cincinnatus was a kid. The trousers and shirts looked as if they were made for some much larger species. And so they had been-Cincinnatus didn't think any of these skeletons on legs weighed more than 120 pounds. Most of them weren't anywhere close to that. A powerful animal stench came from them.
'Do Jesus!' Cincinnatus said again. He was out of the truck and limping toward them before he thought about what he was doing. He had several ration cans in pouches on his belt. 'Here!' he called, and tossed them to the closest captives.
He wasn't the only driver doing the same thing. Anyone who had enough himself-even someone who was only hungry-would have wanted to feed these bright-eyed walking skeletons.
But the food almost touched off a riot. The drivers didn't have enough with them to give everybody some. The starving men who didn't get any tried to steal from the ones who did. Finally, the U.S. guards had to break things up with rifle butts. 'Hate to do it,' one of them said. 'It's like hitting your puppy 'cause he wants a bone. These guys can't help it-they're that hungry. But what can you do? Otherwise, we'll have an even bigger goddamn mess on our hands.'
'You'll all get some soon!' the colonel shouted. 'Honest to God, you will! That's what the trucks are here for- to take you to where there's food.'
That turned the trick. The boneracks in stripes swarmed onto the trucks, which could hold many more of them than of human beings of ordinary dimensions. 'Who are you poor bastards?' Cincinnatus asked.
'We're politicals,' a scrawny man said, not without pride. 'I'm a Whig. I was mayor of Fayetteville, Arkansas.' He looked more like a disaster than a one-time public official. A weak breeze-never mind a strong one-would have knocked him over in a heap. 'I didn't like the Freedom Party. Still don't, by God. And this is what it bought me.'
'What were you doin' in there?' Cincinnatus asked. But the mayor of Fayetteville didn't hang around to chat. That might have cost him a place in a truck, and he wasn't about to take a chance.
One of the guards answered for him: 'They were putting rockets together, that's what-the big mothers that go miles and miles. Featherston's fuckers figured they might as well work 'em to death as just shoot 'em.'
'Oh,' Cincinnatus said in a hollow voice. When the guard said work 'em to death, he wasn't kidding. Some of the men still coming out of the factory would plainly die before they got fed. The dreadful odor that accompanied them from the building said more than a few men were already dead in there.
And yet…What happened to these political prisoners was horrible, no doubt about it. But they still got to try to stay alive. Some of them might have staved off death since before the war began.
The Confederacy's Negroes never got even that much of a chance. They went into camps-and they didn't come out. The politicals who hated the Freedom Party still labored for the Confederate States. Negroes would have done the same…had anyone asked them to.
Nobody seemed to have. The Freedom Party and a lot of white Confederates wanted their Negroes dead-and they got what they wanted. As horrible as this was, it could have been worse. That was, perhaps, the scariest thought of all.
As Cincinnatus got back into the cab of his deuce-and-a-half, he also wondered whether that bird colonel would have made such a fuss if the rocket factory were full of Negro laborers. He shrugged; he couldn't be sure one way or the other. But if he had his doubts-well, who could blame him, considering all the things he'd seen, all the things he'd escaped?
None of which made the plight of the starving, stinking politicals who jammed the back of the truck anything less than dreadful. Yes, if they were black they would have been dead already. But they couldn't last long as things were. Cincinnatus put the truck in gear and drove them off toward whatever help the U.S. Army could give.
E ven with no more than a scratch force of guards, Camp Humble went right on doing what it was designed to do: reducing population. Jefferson Pinkard was proud of that. He was proud of the men he had left, and he was proud of the way he'd designed the camp. It was so smooth, it almost ran itself. You just didn't need a whole lot of guards to herd Negroes from the trains to the trucks and bathhouses, and then to chuck bodies into the crematoria. Everything went as smoothly as it did in any other well-run factory.
Every few weeks, the latest batch of Negro trusties who thought they'd dodged death by playing along discovered they'd made their last mistake. The only thing Jeff kept on being unhappy about was the ovens. The company that made them had come out a couple of times to try to get them to perform better, but without much luck. Pinkard's conclusion was that the contractor had sold him a bill of goods from the start. The greasy black smoke that belched from the stacks and the burnt-meat stench that went with it were part of the operation, and he couldn't do a thing about it.
Trains still brought Negroes to the camp, trains from Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas. He'd also had loads of blacks from Florida and Cuba arrive. The local authorities rounded up their Negroes and sent them to Houston or Galveston by ship. He'd heard reports that subs operating in the Gulf of Mexico had sunk some of those ships. That was funny, in a grim way: the damnyankees were doing some of the Confederacy's work for it.
The telephone on his desk rang. He scowled. Why couldn't people just leave him alone and let him take care of his job? It rang again. Scowling still, he picked it up. 'Pinkard here,' he rasped.
'This here's Lou Doggett, General,' the mayor of Humble said. Pinkard wasn't a general; he had a Party rank instead. But he didn't argue. He'd been a PFC the last time around. If somebody wanted to call him General, he didn't mind a bit.
'What's up?' he asked now.
'Well, I'll tell you, General-the wind's blowing this way from your camp, and it's pretty bad,' Doggett answered. 'This ain't how you told me it was gonna be when you put that camp in.'
'It ain't the way I thought it was gonna be, neither,' Jeff answered. 'But it's the way it is. I don't know what else I can tell you.'
